The Boy Who Saw Angels: Hidden Years of Francesco Forgione, Would Become Padre Pio: 1

Saint Pio of Pietrelcina was a Capuchin friar and Catholic saint of San Giovanni Rotondo who bore the stigmata. What happens to a five year old boy who consecrates himself to God in a field and speaks with his guardian angel as a matter of course?The account opens in the heat and dust of Pietrelcina in the 1880s, amid the smell of bread and olive wood in the devout Forgione household. Francesco experienced ecstasies and apparitions by age five, yet lived a firmly rooted peasant life. At fifteen, he entered the Capuchin novitiate at Morcone, receiving the name Fra Pio and stepping into a world of austerity and Latin. The path to the priesthood was wracked by mysterious respiratory crises and gastric pain that repeatedly forced him home, culminating in his ordination at Benevento in 1910 and a transient stigmata that came and healed. After a cycle of conscription and discharge during the Great War, a frail priest arrived at a wind scoured friary on the Gargano plateau in 1916, stepping into the place heaven intended him to stay.Childhood mystical experiences: the early apparitions and the private consecration of a boy who treated the supernatural as ordinary.Revealing interior letters: the candor of a young friar writing to his spiritual directors about his spiritual dryness and fire.Military service cycles: the repeated conscriptions and medical discharges of a Capuchin drafted into the Italian army.Final permanent transfer: the arrival at the friary in San Giovanni Rotondo where he would spend the rest of his life.Book One of Wounds of Love: The Life of Saint Padre Pio. This volume covers the boyhood and physical trials of Francesco Forgione before the events detailed in The Wounds That Healed the World, which explores his reception of the stigmata in 1918 and his decades of daily pastoral care in the confessional. The arc concludes in Pray, Hope, and Do Not Worry, examining his spiritual guidance on suffering and the Eucharist as well as his heavenly intercession following his death.Readers seeking the peasant childhood of Francesco Forgione, the austere world of his Capuchin novitiate, and the physical trials preceding his priestly ordination.